Greetings and welcome to Word Magazine. This is Jeff Riddle. I'm the pastor of Christ Reformed Baptist Church in Louisa, Virginia. And in this episode of Word Magazine, I have a guest with me. I have the famous Taylor DeSoto of Arizona. And we're going to be discussing in this episode, Taylor's new book came out this year or end of last year, right at the end of last year, sorry, 2024. It's titled The Received Text, subtitled A Field Guide. So Taylor, welcome on Word Magazine. Good to have you here. Yeah. Thank you for having me. Yeah. What's the weather like in Arizona today? Uh, it's actually pretty nice. I think we've got a couple more cold weeks and then it's straight to very, very, very hot for awhile. So we're, we're enjoying the weather for at least another couple of weeks. We had snow yesterday. When I went for my walk this morning, it was snowing again. And so, it's not a huge snow, but this has been a nice winter. We have actually had a couple of good snows here in central Virginia. The last couple of years have been kind of light, but when you live here, you expect the four seasons, you know? But there are some days when I'm like, Arizona would be nice, you know? It'd be nice to have that weather. Well, I'm going to hand if you can handle the hot, then we get we get basically two seasons. We get very hot and kind of cold. So the only time I've been in Arizona is my family went to the Grand Canyon. Yeah, that's great. A few years ago. But I think the environment there is a little probably a little different than where you are. Yeah, it's colder up by the Grand Canyon, yeah. Yeah, and we camped there too, so it was nice, of course, seeing the canyon was awesome. Well, thanks again for being a guest here. I was just thinking about it, how long have I known you? I mean, we sort of connected Maybe back in 2017, 2018, was it? I mean, I know first time we met in person was at the Text and Canon Conference that was held in Atlanta. That was in 2019, but we had been communicating before then. So, you've been in this discussion related to the text of the Bible, defending the traditional text of the Bible and defending Protestant, classic Protestant translations of it for now a long time. Yeah. You're a young man, but you, you've had a lot of experience in it. And you even at one point, Peter Gurry had you as a guest speaker in his class. So you have, you've been out there on the front lines, And your blog, The Young Textless and Reformed, is one that really influenced a lot of people. I mean, I hear from people all the time who say, what's going on with Taylor? And his blog posts really influenced me. Um, so and you you're a writer. I mean you you you you're a One thing about this book and I hope hopefully I want to do a written review of it at some point It's a short book. It's only about 155 pages and you can see it's kind of a a nice pocket size type book But it's well written and it's it's filled with lots of really kind of pithy statements and such. So, but before we get into it, tell me, tell me just a little bit, uh, about your background and, you know, maybe, uh, how you got interested in this topic and how do you have this background so that you have this, you're, you're a good writer. Is this always been something you've done or, um, tell me just a little bit about your background, your interest in this topic. Yeah, of course. So the first time I was introduced to this topic was actually at university. And I was studying at just a secular public university, and I took a couple of Bart Ehrman classes. And I was, so there was lost scriptures, lost gospels, or lost Christianities. And then we essentially, I forget what the classes were named, but essentially we went through his texts on the various Gnostic gospels and the lost gospels. To just be clear, not with Bart Ehrman who teaches at the University of North Carolina, but a class that was similar, similar approach. It was a class that used his texts as the curriculum. OK. Yeah. Yeah. So and it was with a former, I think, Phoenix Sem professor who had, you know, fallen away or there was some story there. And I remember being the only Christian in that class because most most of the people in the class were essentially philosophy majors that kind of had to check off the box. They needed their, you know, some sort of credit for for their their degree. So most people in the class were kind of disinterested and and pretty hostile. And so the tone of the class was very they were kind of joking around at the expense of the Bible a lot. And I was sitting there. I'm like, this is not what I was expecting. And I learned a lot. It was kind of a shotgun blast of, oh, this view exists. And at the time, I was really too young to understand kind of the scope of the conversation. But that kind of led me down the path of, you know, the critical text and kind of taking that view as, okay, this is just what it is. This is the only view. And when I was studying in my pastoral kind of studies, the view of the TR came up, particularly related to the ending of Mark. And I remember having a conversation and it was essentially over how many manuscripts are responsible for jettisoning the ending of Mark, because there was a new ESV that had just come out. And I kind of had this assumption that it was going to be a lot, that it was going to be a significant number of manuscripts that were responsible, right? Because who would question, you know, a very significant portion of scripture for two manuscripts. And I remember sitting against my closet door, kind of like having almost a pseudo mental breakdown. I'm like, there's no way that people would be so irresponsible with this. And I remember listening to a lot of your podcasts on the topic. and understanding that there was a lot more to this discussion than what the average Christian realizes. And I remember having this thought, I wonder if any other Christians would have a similar response to me if they understood that there was two manuscripts responsible for people calling into question the ending of Mark. Would they feel like I felt? And so that launched me into writing a blog, and I took a shot at James White, and I kind of entered it seemed hot. I forgot about that phase of things, because there was a time there where James White decided to attack you and Dane, and do a couple of episodes where he would, you know, he was going to teach you young whippersnappers a lesson or two. Oh, yeah. I don't think he realized y'all's ability to respond to him. in a cogent and charitable way. And so I remember those days. So you were taking these classes, ending of Mark. You're shocked that decisions are being made to remove this traditional part of the Christian scriptures based on it being absent in two manuscripts. And you sort of go down the rabbit hole of learning about textual criticism and issues related to translation. And then we come down the road to 2024, and you write this book. So why did you write this book? What's it about? What did you hope to achieve with it? And you called it the Received Text. You subtitled it A Field Guide. tell me what the book is about and what that subtitle means. Yeah, so in my studies, so after that point where I kind of have my crisis, if you will, where I realized that the whole story is not necessarily being presented in a complete fashion in the footnotes of the ESV and the NASB, there's a lot of information that I think a lot of people might want to know. So I'm like, okay, well, what do I need to know? How big is this conversation? So I start reading Jan Krohn's and D.C. Parker and some of the newer writings like Gurry, I'm learning about the CBGM. And I'm looking at the bill for how much these books cost and the time investment. Some of these books are seven, 800 pages. And one of the things that struck me was that the average Christian, first of all, doesn't have a $5,000 budget to buy all of these books published in Bart Ehrman's series, academic series, and then further, When you read these books, you need to know some Latin, you need to know some Greek, you need to actually understand all these annotations that they're using, these abbreviations you're using. The conversation is dense. And the average person just simply doesn't have the time or resources to spend on this kind of endeavor. And so my heart behind the book was essentially, hey, I'm going to distill what they're saying. This is, in essence, what they're saying. This is what you need to know without having to buy the $800 textbook. That's 1,200 pages that even if you had it, how long would it take you to learn all the Latin and the Greek and the here's what it says. This is what the academic consensus is. Here's the response to it. This is what you need to know. So that was that was the spirit behind the book. was I identified that there was sort of a gatekeeping mechanism, keeping just the average church-going Christian from accessing this conversation. And without speaking too negatively about some of the academics, when you engage with them, there's oftentimes this sort of haughty kind of you're not a scholar mindset. How dare you? talk on this issue, where's your degree from Cambridge? Do you even have a secondary university credential? And so there's a lot of this gatekeeping mechanism, first of all, in the cost of the books, the difficulty of the material. And then if you actually want to try to engage in the conversation, you're going to get this sort of credentialist response And so the average person's like, they're throwing their hands up and they're saying, I'm just gonna accept my footnotes, whatever it says at the bottom of my ESV, at the page of my ESV, that's what I'm gonna believe. And the conversation is very difficult to gain entry into. So I wanted to give people an inroad and just say, hey, I did the thing, I spent the money, I spent the time, so you don't have to. And I wanted to write a short book, just a field guide. You know, this is what you need to know to enter the conversation. This is what they're saying. This is the view that they're espousing. In fact, here's a number of views that are espoused. It's not, it's not just King James only-ism and everything else, right? There's, there's two, there's an academic text by Andrew Naselly, which essentially distills James White's view. And in a reductionistic way, and I acknowledge that this is reductionistic, but this is essentially what it says, that there are two views. The correct view and King James-onlyism. And that's it. And you'll see in their little tables and figures that they present that the majority text view is King James-onlyism. You'll see that the grandma who just never stopped reading the KJV, well that's King James-onlyism. And that would be okay if you're describing that, but then to go on and say, well King James-onlyism is a cult. Okay, so now you've just described grandma as a cultist, you've described majority text guys as a cultist. And to me, that's not a very accurate or fair representation, even if you're not explicitly saying that. The way that the polemics are done around the issue, it really does box everybody who reads a KJV for whatever reason into this sort of very negative pejorative view. And so I wanted to dispel that. I don't think that's a helpful framing of the conversation. As you know, the majority text guys will debate with the TR guys, will debate with the critical text guys. These camps are distinct camps. And even if a majority text view person reads the KJV, the reason they're reading the KJV and the way they're reading the KJV might be completely different than the way that I read the KJV, that you read the KJV. You know, there's nuance. And that was one of the big things I wanted to communicate in the book in a pretty distilled fashion. So you were trying to simplify the big conversations that take place over text and translation. And you just noted, maybe we'll come back to this a little bit later, because I know towards the end of the book, you talked about how opponents of the traditional text often use pejoratives. You're KJV only, you're TR only or whatever. And as a rhetorical device to sort of shut up the other side, But I think you were also talking a little bit about gatekeeping and academia. And yeah, of course, I've run into that same sort of thing, too. One person in particular who actually directly told me, you shouldn't be talking about this because you don't have the proper education about it, despite the fact that I'm a pastor and I even have a credential doctoral degree in New Testament. But I don't know enough about it to I should not be talking about this topic. I should be quiet and listen to the textual criticism magisterium about it. But so it's hard to know exactly where to jump in here because there's so much in the book is short. But there's a lot in it, and it's really a quote factory, too. You've got a lot of great quotations in it. Thank you. Maybe we could dip in here a little bit. One of the things that you say is, you say that most ordinary believers don't understand that the goal of textual criticism has changed. Yeah, that that there are a lot of people, typical people, maybe they're in the pew, typical evangelical. They think, well, the scholars are, you know, working with these manuscripts and there's trying to find the original. And doesn't it make sense to want to look at the oldest and best manuscripts? You say again, this is one of your quotes on page 74, you say, there is not a single scholar alive today who believes he is reconstructing the original text. So speak to that person who maybe is a broad evangelical who thinks, I don't understand what the big deal is. Why are you guys who are trying to promote the Protestant text, isn't that an outdated text? And aren't scholars today simply trying to use reason and research and the most recent findings to reconstruct the original text so we can have what the apostles wrote. That's what James White, I just want what Paul wrote. So what's your response to that? So it's a really important conversation because I talked to men like Peter Gurry, Elijah Hickson, and I think they genuinely desire to have the original. In a lot of cases, these scholars, it's not like a malicious conspiracy where they're like, we're going to say one thing and do another thing. They desire the same thing that you and I desire, to have the original. The important thing to note is that the substance of their methodology is not geared towards an original. Nowhere in the terminology, nowhere in the methods, nowhere in the practicum of their methodology is it attempting to or capable of finding the original. So while a lot of these Christian scholars may have the best intentions in the world, they want what Paul wrote. That may be true. They're not using the correct methodology to get that. Because their methods cannot get that. And they recognize this. You read Junkind, you read Gurry, you read Hickson, you read damn Wallace. They all agree that there's a methodological gap in their process. And that methodological gap cannot give you the original. And so I think a lot of the Warfield era scholars and Christians thought that, hey, this was going to be an effort that we were going to wrap up in 20 years. We're going to get a better, more accurate text, and then we're going to be done. Now, whether that's true or not, I'm not sure, but I think that that was the intention, right? We, if we found this new evidence, let's take a look at it. Let's, let's scope it out. Let's figure out where we, you know, there's probably some minor tweaks we need to make. The effort has evolved into just outright skepticism. and really dangerous skepticism. Guri notes in his work on the CBGM that in many cases that the CBGM, this new tool that's being used, has introduced more skepticism. just because the more data they get, the more they realize these methods aren't capable of getting us an original. And so they've shifted to this initial text idea, which is essentially to say the furthest we can go back with the extant evidence text. And that's not in line with what Protestant theology teaches. We actually do need an authentic text to authenticate our doctrines in our Christian faith and practice. The Christian religion makes absolute truth claims about who Jesus Christ is and the importance of faith in Jesus Christ. Now you throw skepticism into that. Well, did it really say that? And was that really in the original text? And you have doctrines like the expansion of piety, which says that Jesus divinity was expanded upon. And in fact, the early church didn't actually believe that Jesus was as God as the Protestants or the Catholics turned it into later on. And you start to see these really, really devastating doctrines emerge out of this idea that the text changed and is changing. And whether or not the Christian academics desire an original text, their methodology moves them in a direction of skepticism. Even, you know, I'll say, I'll reiterate this, even if they personally desires an original text, the method itself can't deliver that desire. Yeah. I mean, you noted, yeah, they're looking for what they call the German term is the Ausgang's text or the initial text. And that's the text as far back as they can reconstruct it. And when you say there's a methodological gap, are you talking about the fact that what they're saying is, you know, the apostles wrote the originals in the first century and there's literally a couple hundred years gap. where the earliest manuscripts we have maybe might be a papyri from the third century or the fourth century, or when you get to the unseals of the fourth century. Well, this gets to be two, three hundred years after the time when the New Testament was written. And so these modern scholars are saying, yeah, the best we can do. Now, they'll come back. I've heard some evangelicals say, well, the initial text, you know, is essentially the authorial text. But if you read the practitioners of CBGM, if you read just the introductory material to the Nessel on 28th edition, the current scholarly edition, they specifically say, hey, when we say initial text, we don't mean the authorial text. Right. And they're very explicit about that. Yeah. So you're using a methodology, right? Even if you are evangelical, like you said, that is declared, we really don't know what the text is. Even if we had it, we wouldn't recognize it. Yeah. And they don't like when we use that Wallace quote, but it summarizes what they believe. I mean, James White often does this thing where he says, some of these papyri are the size of a credit card. And it's like, Yes, that's the, you know, there's a one of the myths, the mistake book that was that was published by Hickson and Gurry points out that yes, we do have thousands of manuscripts, but that number oftentimes is very inflated because they're counting credit card size. So like when you say we have thousands of manuscripts, a lot of people picture like full put together manuscripts, start to finish 66 books. That's not what we're talking about. A lot of those manuscripts come way later. And the actual corpus of manuscripts from the early third, fourth, fifth century, it's not the 5,000 manuscript number that people often quote in apologetics. And they point out that we need, in this book that they produced, the Myths and Mistakes book, we need to stop using that argument in apologetics. that's not an accurate representation of the data. And which is why in my approach, I take a more presuppositional ecclesiastical approach, because we have to cover that gap as well. And the way I love the way that you present it with the church argument, how the early church had these completed Bibles and that's how the manuscripts were propagated by Christians in the early church. And that's a perfectly coherent argument. If we're going off of just extant data, what has survived, as James White even points out, wars and weathering. I mean, it's pieces of paper. There's a lot of textual evidence that has simply been lost to time. And if we're using that as our best evidence, we have to admit that our evidence is incomplete. Therefore, our argument is going to be weakened by that incomplete corpus of evidence. And so there's a lot of myths and mistakes when it comes to even apologetics with this method. And I don't think a lot of people realize just how weak their arguments sound to the Muslim or to the atheist. If you've ever talked to someone who's steeped in Bart Ehrman, Elaine Pagels and the like, They aren't convinced by your textual argument from a critical text perspective because they probably know the literature better than you do. And Bart Ehrman, as far as I'm concerned, is pretty much the authority on the textual extant evidence right now. So a lot of the time you're running yourself into a wall because they know your argument and your argument isn't strong to them. And so that's one of the reasons why I think a more presuppositional approach is a better approach to actually defending the Scriptures. It's a more biblical approach to defending the Scriptures. Right, right. I was listening, it made me think of a couple of things. I was listening recently to a podcast someone had sent to me of a guy who knows well the study of the Old Testament and the Hebrew manuscripts and whatnot. And he's apparently, I don't know where he stands, if he's an agnostic or what he is, but he was just, he was totally picking apart, what's the guy's name? Wesley Huff. And the comments he made on Joe Rogan's podcast about how the Isaiah scroll, the Dead Sea Scrolls is verbatim with the Masoretic text, and he just was completely picking him apart, taking him apart. And then he was playing clips. from John Mead and other people who are trying to correct as best they could some of Hough's misstatements, but still make them fit with this idea of the Reconstruction text. And like you said, the sorts of people who are really hardened skeptics and who are informed They are not convinced by the reconstruction method advocated by evangelicals. It doesn't convince them. And I just recently, I did a Zoom meeting with some pastors in Kenya. that was set up for the Tridentine Bible Society. And several of them were asking me questions about doing apologetics with Muslims in Kenya. And these same sort of issues were coming up. And what I heard from them was the normal evangelical arguments don't work. in apologetics with Muslims who don't believe that the scriptures have been faithfully preserved. And so these, basically the evangelicals just give the store over and say, yep, they were all corrupted and we're trying to reconstruct them. We're not really sure what they are, but we're hoping maybe with our next couple of editions, we'll be able to reconstruct it. We're talking about the contrast between that and a classic Protestant view that says, we have the Bible. It has been preserved. And it has been. And so maybe that would be a good point to stop and say, OK, you've talked about the problems with modern textual criticism, the initial text, and continual uncertainty about the text. What is the Protestant alternative to that? Because I know you talk about that in the book as well. Yeah, I take a different approach than a lot of, I think, authors on the topic have taken, where I essentially say, rather, I do present kind of a positive view, a positive argument for the TR, but I also just say, listen, this is our heritage. We have inherited this Bible. Give me a good reason to abandon it. What is your strong evidence? Two manuscripts? That's why we're jettisoning our tradition? And it might be a reductionistic argument, but I think it's a strong argument. You know, you have the fathers of our faith, of the Protestant religion, the kind of the pillars of the Protestant Reformation saying, hey, this is our Bible. And then for 400 years, this is our Bible. For what reason are we giving it up? What's the good reason? And I kind of flipped the argument over and put the burden of proof on the critical text side and say, what evidence have you produced that is convincing enough for me to jettison my tradition, my birthright, my inheritance? Why should I be compelled by you? And that's essentially the argument I make. And it's interesting because it flips the ball in their court and says, OK, convince me now. We're not the ones that have to defend our position. You have to defend yours. Why are you throwing away our Bible? What's the reason? That's interesting because sometimes, as you well know, you'll hear from people who are critics of the traditional texts, they'll say, I don't know why you guys are getting so up in arms. There's really not that much difference between the received texts and the modern critical text. And you want to say back, well, if that's the case, why do you want to abandon the traditional text? If it's not that significantly different, why would you want to overturn the apple cart and get rid of this text that has served the church for hundreds of years and has been the basis the foundation for Protestant preaching teaching translation and so forth you you have a little part in the book Where you discuss also something that I hear a lot and people will say well Beza Was just doing the same thing that text critics are doing today. He was examining the manuscripts and he was using canons of textual criticism and he was adjudicating, making decisions. What's the difference between what the way Beza or some of the other early Protestant scholars approached the text and the way post-enlightenment modern text critics approach the text of scripture? Yeah, this is a great question, especially because men like James White and a lot of his cohort try to frame the discussion as though Beza was doing modern textual criticism. What Beza was doing is exactly what Bart Ehrman and cohort are doing now. And the men and women at the Nestle Aland Foundation, you know, it's just the same thing. But you read, there's a book by Jan Kranz, which is one of those kind of gatekeeping mechanisms, the 900 page, really expensive academic textbook. And he points out that he actually doesn't like Beza's approach. He thinks that Beza does silly things like take the kind consideration of the church into too much weight. And so this is not something that, oh, I just disagree with his method. No, you're pointing out a foundation of his method. He is saying that the consideration of the people of God is actually part of the methodology. This is not something you can just hand wave and say, oh, Deza was just being silly. No, this indicates a larger theological framework that Basil was applying to his so-called text criticism. He understood that there was a reception of verses. So throwing out something like 1 John 5, 7 would have been offensive to the kind consideration of the people of God. And so we wouldn't do that on the basis of whatever textual evidence he was looking at. Because the reception of the text is equally as valid as the textual evidence itself that he had available to him. So it just indicates a difference in method. And whether or not you disagree. Yeah, go ahead. Would you say he was taking into consideration an estimation of how the text had been providentially preserved? Yeah. And how it had been used. Here's one of your quotes, page 78, you said of Beza. His methods were not text critical. They were text receptive. And maybe that gets it at what you're saying, so that they were not doing the same thing as modern textual critics. Let me ask you this. One of the things that we've heard over the years And some of the people who are antagonistic towards the retrieval of the traditional Protestant text, they say, oh, you've never thought about this one. Which TR? Which TR? Oh, we got you on that one. What do you say to somebody who thinks they have pulled out a silver bullet? And they say to you, well, which TR are you talking about? Well, it's a really good question if you're approaching the problem with a text critical perspective. Because in their mind, when a variant comes into play, uncertainty is a necessity, right? So they're saying, oh, see, look, you guys have variation too. Since we can't determine authenticity, you can't either. But that's not the approach of the historical Protestants. You look at Turretin, and you look at John Owen, and you look at all of these men who dealt with textual variation, and they said, yeah, this is the variant. This is the authentic text right here. And in fact, it's quite easy to determine. Take a look at these things. This is what the original said. So we have a question like which TR we say, OK, yes, we recognize there's a corpus of so-called TRs. And you can talk about how the variation is just incredibly minuscule compared to the critical text variation. But I don't think that matters. It's just it's kind of a distraction. The point is, when we approach a variant, we know that there is an authentic text that can be derived because we know that the Bible has been preserved. So if we look, let's just say there's a handful of variation in a certain part of the text. We know that with the evidence that has been preserved and handed down and received, there is a conclusion we can arrive to from the evidence given to us. And we know that this conclusion is the one that's been received and handed down and will be quite apparent to anyone actually taking a look at the variant in itself. And so this is the approach that our Protestant forefathers took. They said, yeah, there's variation here, but this is obviously the answer. This is the one that we're going to receive. And you look at that through the printed editions. And we point to the KJV because that's the most authoritative and loud agreement and reception, if you will, of any amount of textual variation because the church received it and then used it. We have a 400 year track record of these variations being agreed upon. And so I think to kind of summarize, if you're viewing textual variation as something that introduces an unlimited amount of uncertainty. So when variation exists, we'll never know. And we can't possibly know, even if it was staring at us in the face, as Dan Walsh kind of says. If you approach the question with that view, yeah, it's a great retort. But if you look at it from the way that the traditional or received text or confessional view looks at it, we look at variation and say, OK, well, the original is here, and we can determine it. So why is this such an important question to you? And I think that the bigger problem is that I think the critical text perspective doesn't understand our framework, because there's so steeped in pejorative, and these are just KJV only, they just, this is who they are. They don't understand our perspective at all, for whatever reason. They don't understand this is not a big deal to us. You had a great presentation on the subject a few years back, and essentially, it's just a non-question. We can determine the original because the original has been preserved. And I'm not sure why they don't understand that. Yeah, well, they also, it's confusing. They're saying they think that to be consistent, our position must say we point to this printed edition as the authoritative one, even though we repeatedly say we're not pointing to any particular printed edition, but we are pointing to the common text of the Protestant Reformation that was represented in several different printed editions. And there was a general consensus that can be seen through the printed editions and then the translation of them into the vernacular. And here's your answer, though. This is on page 112 of the book. You said, in summary, the answer to the which TR question is this. The text received during the Reformation era and then used to make translations that brought the gospel to countless nations for the next four centuries. Critical text advocates cannot deny the power and effect that the received text has had on the world. So next time they ask which TR, simply respond, the text that Christianized all the Western world. And so I don't think that's going to be a very, honestly, satisfactory response to our critics, because I think they won't get it. But I've also taken to when, you know, I'll have somebody challenge that, I'll sometimes respond and say, which TR? I'll say, well, the one that has the traditional ending of Mark. Right, right, yeah. The one that has the woman taking an adultery. The one that has Acts 8.37. The one that has the doxology of the Lord's Prayer, Matthew 6, 13b. The one that has in John 1, 18, monogamous huios, the only begotten son. That is the text. And it's not a, it's not an infinite number of variants among those preservations of the TR. It's a very limited and minor number of differences in those printed editions. And what they really don't like is the incredible consensus that was there in the Protestant era. And they're willing to jettison all of that for a new translation flavor of the month that comes up with this, accepts a reading at one point, denies it the next. and so forth. Any other thoughts on that question in particular? Not so much anymore. It's one of those questions. I think the biggest thing that is important with this is that you're never going to get probably a response that you like. When you answer this question coherently, the reason that people ask this question is sort of a got you. That means that you're engaging probably not in the most good faith debate. Because it's not a question that seeks understanding. You read Jan Krohn's and you read the academics on the received text, they agree that there was a consensus text. And if there wasn't a consensus text, then what is your text? Why is it so important that people reject this other text? And one thing that's really interesting, and I make this argument a lot, according to their doctrine of inspiration and the Warfieldian kind of Chicago statement, the TR is inerrant. And so I don't quite understand. You know, you'll hear James White say that the biggest difference between the TR and blah, blah, blah is so minor. It doesn't change any doctrine. Then why are you so aggressive towards it? Why do you want people to stop using it? If according to your theological perspective, this is an inerrant, no doctrines changed Bible, what's the problem? And this is part of the reason why I don't really understand where they're coming from when they debate against the TR. It's like you have to accept this Bible as a Bible because no doctrines have been changed, right? So when you rail against the TR, what are the implications of that? What are the implications of being aggressive or hostile towards a Bible that has all the right doctrines according to you? Right, right. Well, it is a very strange phenomenon. The animus that is expressed against the classic Protestant translation in English, the authorized version, And then, like I said, there are two separate issues, the text of the Bible and the translations of the Bible. But if you're defending the traditional text, and you might not even mention translation at all. you're going to get attacked as being a KJV onlyist. And it's kind of strange because I know your story a little bit, but you weren't raised in a Christian home. You came to the faith as an adult, correct? Is that right? Yeah, I was 17, so I was almost there. So you're not carrying a lot of baggage of having been in an IFB, Fundamental Baptist Church, And so many people I run into that have this animus, incredible animus against the authorized version, especially. A lot of times they're carrying a lot of baggage from their bad experiences in IFB. I didn't grow up with that either. I grew up Southern Baptist, more broad evangelical. But they really get very excited in the opposition to the use of the King James Version. You talk a little bit about, towards the end of the book, about the use of pejoratives, and you have a little discussion on King James Version-only-ism, and you lay out a couple of categories. So, tell me a little bit about what is King James Version-only-ism. Are you a King James Version-only-ist, Taylor? Well, I think according to James White and his cohort, yes. But I think that it's really, first of all, it's not too valuable because when people think King James only as I'm they're thinking of, you know, in their mind, like rabid fundamentalist Baptists and like, you know, I can I can empathize with men like Mark Ward, who clearly had some sort of religious. I don't know if abuse would be the right word, but he clearly he clearly has some sort of baggage. from that world. And and so I don't mitigate that experience. Right. There's definitely some forms of King James only ism that can tend in that direction. But the point that I want to make is that, OK, I think the average who you're calling a King James only is just somebody that wants one Bible. And they say this is the Bible. Right. Like, why do we need to compete? Why do why do we need to complicate the topic? And there's obviously more nuance in the discussion of king james only ism. There's people we call like the re-inspiration view Where they believe that the translators of the king james were re-inspired, but that as far as I can tell today, that's a very minority view This is not I said it I think you said in the book that you're not sure you've ever actually met anyone who actually who really holds that position No, and I talk to a lot of people on the topic. I get messages and emails all the time. I've never met, and in fact, whenever I do talk about it, people are like, who are these people? Like, where do these people exist? And to be fair, I've talked to some of my friends that live in the middle of the country, and I guess these churches do exist. They are real. They're not where I'm at, and they're not where most people that I talk to are. So I can acknowledge that there are minority congregations that do believe in some sort of re-inspiration view where rather than the Bible being God-inspired. I guess God inspired the translation committee of the King James. It's just such a minority view. And part of the problem with using this King James-onlyism pejorative is that that's what people think. When you say King James only is that's what their view. That's what their understanding is. Their understanding is, oh, you believe that the King James was reinspired and that and that no one had the Bible for a thousand over a thousand years. That's what they're thinking. And that's why I think it's not a very valuable term to be throwing around, because that's not what people believe. And there's a difference between that type of person that that may be largely hypothetical. Like you said, perhaps there are some, there are some, you know, there are perhaps some scattered, uh, KJV only type of churches that would, that would say that. But, uh, again, you don't commonly run into someone who says, I believe the Bible was inspired in 1611 through this translation. More likely you run into someone who says, this is the Bible that I read. This is the Bible that I like. And you made the point, you quoted the Lifeway study. I actually just recently had somebody, a guy who tracks this, email me and was talking about the most recent report on Bible sales and surveys of Bible reading. And much to the consternation of advocates for modern translations, the KJV and the NKJV, if you count it with respect to the New Testament, based on the TR, Right. It's still a huge chunk of Bible sales. And it's when they do these surveys, it's still the author's version is still the book that most people who were counted as serious Bible readers are still reading. Yeah, it's still it's still widely read and used. And but so anyways. There's an attempt to make it appear to be something obscurantist. Now you do say some provocative things in this book. You say some pretty provocative things about reading. One of the things that you say is you question the wisdom of people who say you should read lots of different translations. We hear this a lot. I've probably said it a lot. You should read lots of different translations. And so you say no. Why do you say that? So I really appreciate Pastor Joel Beeky's little article on this. Essentially that using one translation gives us a shared theological language. So when we're street preaching or when we're evangelizing in our homes or in our friends' and family's homes, having a theological language that can be recognized by anybody. Oh, they're speaking scripture right now. I know what that sounds like. And it's really interesting because even those of the critical text slam will often quote the King James when they do their scripture memorization, because that's probably what they were raised with. And so there's a certain level of just brand recognition, right? When you're using the so-called archaic language, the biblical language of the KJV, people recognize it. And there's a lot of value in ministry to that. Further, there's a lot of value in the church of having a shared theological language. When you're speaking in small group settings, or from the pulpit, having the same text in front of you that the whole congregation has is so valuable. I can't tell you, and I bring this up all the time on my blog, and I might have even mentioned it in my book, that I have seen probably a dozen small group Bible studies been derailed because someone says, well, that's not what mine says. Yours says this. And then now we're talking about textual variation. Now we're talking about the text critical issue instead of diving into God's word. And that can't be like, I can't stress that enough how distracting it is to have hundreds of different Bibles available that are all saying things differently. And so there's a huge amount of value to reading one translation. I don't think I even need to emphasize anything more than that. I think that's a strong enough argument to say when we speak to each other, having that same lexicon of words to communicate the ideas together, all these books behind me, they're all written with that vernacular. And so if you want to access your historical heritage as a Protestant, you need to be able to understand the King's English. And so I think there's a lot, there's so many reasons. And Joel Beeky will say, says it better than I'll ever will. But that's what the argument is in a nutshell. And I guess one more point in apologetics, if you quote one version and another Christian is quoting another version, all the Muslim has to do is say, well, who's right? Which one is the Bible? Because you just quoted the ESV, you just quoted the NASB, you just quoted the NLT, you just quoted the NKJV. Which one's right? Who's right here? Yeah, the skeptic or the opponent of the traditional text wants to throw out which TR, but what they don't understand is that their method leads us in conversation with skeptics and Muslims an atheist who will say, which Bible? You guys don't even know what your Bible is. I had a podcast conversation sometime back with some brothers from the Free Church of Scotland continuing, and they were making the argument, as you are, for the value of uniformity of common translation within a church. You also pointed out a little bit in your conversation, you were suggesting that the multiplication of translations has led to skepticism among people as to the value of translations. It's not elevated people's high view of the Bible. We have the Bible translated, but it's sort of downplayed so that, well, there are different translations. One says one thing, one says another. And you suggest at least the skepticism and also back to, why don't you read lots of different translations? You make the point in the book that all this emphasis to many ordinary Christians of you need to read lots of different translations and you need to do a lot of study. It leads them to think, how am I ever going to be able to understand the Bible? Here's one of your quotes, page 127. You said, the average Christian seems to be expected to attain a four-year degree just to read 1 John. Yep. So what about that angle on things? Yeah, I've never heard the argument so frequently in the last five years as, well, the Bible's been translated too many times, how can I trust it? I mean, it always used to be more Bart Ehrman kind of route. Now people are just like, well, there's just too many translations. Like, how could I take this seriously? But then on the point that you're bringing up, this gatekeeping mechanism of the academy, like Mark Ward in his book, I think he genuinely has good intentions with this, but he tells you that you need to have your study Bible, your lexicon, your ESV, your NASB, your message Bible, you know, have this, desk, like I need to invest in a big desk to read my Bible. And it's just throwing things in front of the average Christian that are just unnecessary. Here's what you need. You need- And you need the Logos software. Yeah, you need a Bible software. It's infomercial for the Logos software. And all that, yeah, exactly. And all that I'm saying is, hey, here's a Bible, go find a comfy chair and read it. And so I think that one of the things that I've tried to emphasize on my blog a lot, that if the point of this conversation, of this debate, isn't to get people to dive deeper into the Word of God and deepen their knowledge and relationship with the Lord, What are we doing? You're telling someone, and I know this is kind of anecdotally, but people that feel like when they don't have their time to get out their study Bible and all their different texts in front of them, they feel like they're not engaging with the word of God meaningfully. It's like, no, you need to get in prayer. You need to get in your prayer closet, get in your comfy chair, get alone with the text. Take all the distractions away. Here's your Bible. Read it a lot. How about that? How about that? Can we do that? I think that would be good. And I would add, you know, go to your church to listen to your elders. Teach. Use the Bible corporately. It's also a liturgical book. It's a book of private devotion. It's also a liturgical book to be used in worship. Taylor, I could talk. We you and I could go on and on. I feel like we did. We it's a short book, but we didn't. We didn't scratch the surface of all the material that's in there. I do heartily commend the book. I think you'll find it. It's really easy. It's a couple hours to sit down and read it and it's well written and it's a quote factory. I've put up a couple quotes on my ex account and every time it gets it gets it catches comments. because it's a lot of pithy sayings in it. But anyways, I think we got to bring things to a close and we both have appointments we need to get to. So as we close out, let me just ask, how can people get this book? It's on Amazon, is that right? You can get it on Amazon, and then you can get it, I believe there's a link on Pastor McShaffery's site. Maybe we can include that in the description of the post here. I'll put that there. Yeah, I got mine off of Amazon. Yeah, um, but yeah, so there's two ways to get it from christian mcshaffrey's site and then from amazon That's those two places and it's published by the kept pure press. That's right Yeah, my wife doesn't like to order things from amazon. So she yeah, so if you avoid if you don't get it Yeah, she can get it any other way. She she does it any other way? But uh anyways, and then how can people follow your writing ministry? Are you still posting to your blog? Oh, I post every now and then, but I'm at young Texas reform dot com. You can you can go. I've written two hundred and fifty thousand words on my blog. So that's what that's why I kind of say, like, I feel like I've said all I had to say on the topic for the most part. Two hundred fifty thousand words is a lot of words to write. So go there. Look at the archives. If something is provocative or I feel like I have something to say, I'll write something new. But I don't know. I don't want to inject more words where I don't need to. So I don't write every day like I used to. Sure. Well, thank you so much for being a guest with us today. I enjoyed reading the book and I'd commit it to others. I hope that this episode of Word Magazine has been helpful for those who are listening. And I hope that you've been encouraged by what you've heard. I'll look forward to speaking to you in the next episode of Word Magazine. Till then, take care and may the Lord richly bless you.